“Um, is it Colonel Vindman in the Russian Tea room with the coronavirus?”

“Very funny. Now everyone settle down. Welcome back to Propaganda and the Death of Media 101 in case you’re in the wrong class, and its, um, March 15, 2024. Now we were discussing the role of propaganda and the media in trying to influence the re-election of Donald Trump by tying his leadership to a global pandemic. Propaganda in these cases seeks to diminish people’s view of a leader’s competence. The ultimate goal is to get you to vote him out.

For those of you in the back holding up those tattered Bernie signs, God rest his soul, let’s start with the question of whether the media engaged in propaganda at all. Contrast the sense of panic in 2020 whipped into place with how things played out in 2009 under Obama. The first cases of the swine flu, H1N1, appeared in April 2009. By the time Obama finally declared a national emergency that fall, the CDC reported 50 million Americans, one in six people, had been infected and 10,000 Americans had died. In the early months of the disease, Obama had no Secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the Department’s 19 key posts. No Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, no Surgeon General, no CDC Director. The gap at CDC was particularly important, as in the early days of the crisis only they could test for the virus; states weren’t enabled until later. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, not a medical doctor, lead the federal effort.

The first real H1N1 cases appeared in Mexico. The border was not sealed, Mexicans were not forbidden to enter the U.S. Though CDC recommended against travel there, the primary danger cited was kidnapping for ransom. Yet 66 percent of Americans, supported by the media, thought the president was protecting them. Some 4,000 Americans were dead before a vaccine was first distributed.

The emergency proclamation it took Obama seven months to declare was issued by Trump within 30 days of the current virus being found abroad. He announced a temporary suspension of entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals who pose a risk for the transmission of the coronavirus (CNN criticized “the travel ban could stigmatize countries and ethnicities.”) And yes, Trump encouraged everyone to wash their hands.

Anybody here remember the media freaking out over Obama’s initial response, which was hand washing was pretty much what was needed? Anyone who did the reading find evidence of national panic throughout the crisis? No. Why did the media cover essentially the identical story so very differently for two presidents? The question is the answer.

Look at the timing in 2020; the crisis came when the media decided it was time for a crisis. Though the virus dominated headlines in Asia since mid-January, American media first relegated the story to the business news. In late February the main “Trump” story was Russiagate II, the revelation (which quickly fell apart) the Russians were meddling again in the election. The Democratic debate at the end of February invoked Putin many times. The virus barely came up.

Then the NYT sent up the Bat Signal for the new crisis on February 26, the day after the Democratic debate, with an article titled “Let’s Call It Trumpvirus” (subtlety is not required for propaganda.) An effort was born overnight to blame Trump personally for the virus, and essentially declare his chances of reelection done. The critical change was not anything to do with the virus itself, simply with the decision by the media to elevate the story from the business section to the front page. Even a week after that, with American sanity in a tailspin, only two Americans had died, and about half the known U.S. cases arrived with the evacuees from Japan. Of course the numbers quickly went up (that’s why we use the expression “going viral” for your Instagram blowups, kids) but imagine what a graph of actual cases would look like versus a graph measuring panic.

You’ll see in your textbooks another example which shows how propaganda works, the reporting of initial problems with the CDC coronavirus test kits. One typical headline claimed “The U.S. Badly Bungled Coronavirus Testing.” But the problems were old news almost as the stories were written; 15,000 testing kits were released within 48 hours of that story with plans to send out an additional 50,000. Each kit can test 700-800 patient samples.

The follow-on stories screamed about Trump funding cuts to the CDC, most of which were actually only proposed. Then the stories were merged — Trump cut CDC funding and thus not enough kits were available. Not only were both pieces largely untrue individually (few cuts were made, kits were available), the merging of the two was grossly false. Instead of examining these things for lessons learned in the midst of an unfolding crisis, the media treated them as new bits to mock Trump with, like late night comedians trolling the news for material for their monologue.

No room was left for people making errors in novel decisions under time pressure, just the jump to “Trump incompetence” instead of doing the real work of looking into the questions. The problem with the testing kits was a highly technical one involving chemical reagents and factory contamination. CDC is a massive institution. Who if anyone there made any “bungled” decisions? Would they have likely made a better decision with different funding? If so, then Congress can act and drop some money on that office. If not, move on, there is work to do. It is how the media acts when they seek to fix the blame, not the problem.

The propaganda surrounding how the government initially handled the coronavirus was also obvious in the false “who is in charge” question the media asked. The vice president was given the role heading up the task force. This is the kind of thing VPs do, bring gravitas, make sure a whole of government approach has the bureaucratic firepower it needs, and so on. The propaganda instead hyper-focused on Mike Pence’s “disbelief in science,” itself more of a chanted mantra than anything established by fact. For “proof” the stories settled on Pence supposedly creating an HIV epidemic while governor of Indiana. The reality is much different. Pence took office opposed to needle exchanges. When dirty needles shared among opioid users in rural Scott County, Indiana were linked to 71 cases of HIV transmission, Pence responded to the new information (sad to see people die, but 71 deaths is all it was and many would have died from their drugs soon enough) by changing his policy and authorizing needle exchange in Scott and four other counties. The reality seems much closer to seeing an ideological stance changed by science than the opposite.

—
Pence said at the time “I’m going to put the lives of the people of Indiana first. It’s a commitment to law and order, but it’s a commitment to compassion.”
—

Meanwhile, the media largely ignored those Pence chose for the taskforce. One was Dr. Deborah Birx, a career medical professional nominated by Obama in 2014 as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. She also served as head of the global HIV/AIDS division at CDC, was an immunology researcher at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and an Army colonel. You want to inspire confidence you profile Dr. Brix; you want to sow discord you misrepresent Mike Pence’s decisions years ago.

There’s so many more examples, but our class time is short. Here are a few.

You can report on the elimination of Obama’s pandemic czar but leave out that the position was just a coordination job on the National Security Council with no real power. It sounds scary (one outlet called it sabotage) to see that job go, but in fact the coordination duties within NSC were reassigned to others.

You can focus on every coronavirus case as proof efforts are failing while ignoring providing perspective by reminding 12,000 people died, with over 13 million infected, from the regular influenza (the one with the vaccine) between October 2019 and February 2020.

You can focus on time will take to develop a full-on vaccine and ignore the treatments already now in human testing trials.

You can purposefully confuse accelerating public health measures already underway with America’s lack of universal individual health care. We have plenty of the former, not enough of the latter. But the pandemic is not a solid argument for the latter as it is a problem of public health policy. That’s why even countries with good, free care systems are suffering the virus. Medicare for All would not have changed anything in 2020.

You can cover the virus as you did Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Everyone was gonna die there until they didn’t. You can follow the now-standard Trump propaganda template: say he won’t do enough, then say what he does isn’t being done fast enough, predict everything will collapse (with Katrina references) and then move on to a new crisis as the reality of the response takes hold.

You can report on panic selling on Wall Street, or explain how global supply chain problems are not caused by the virus, but by traders’ reaction to the unknowns of the virus. China’s factories closed because the government enforced social isolation, not because the workers were dead. Soon enough Apple products flowed back into our greedy hands, and the stock market found its way back to a new normal.

You can report store closings, but not their reopenings. By March 1 Starbucks had reopened 85 percent of its stores in China. Apple, over 50 percent. You can emphasize how many Chinese factories were closed in February, or report on their reopenings in March.

You can misrepresent the use of words like hoax to make the president appear weak.

You can ignore the drop off in cases inside China. Only a few days after the first cases appeared in the U.S., new ones inside China dropped to 200.

You can avoid reporting how viruses follow a bell curve. Case counts first rise quickly, the virus claims the “easy” deaths among the elderly, and then environmental factors (viruses must live inside a host; they have limited life outside on surfaces`, typically less and less as temperatures climb. This is why you can’t catch HIV from a toilet seat) and public health measures kick in. Treatment emerges and the virus fades. You can explain to calm people where they are in what looks like a 10-12 week cycle to or you can ignore it to stoke fear of the unknown.

The bell curve template is clearly illustrated by a look-back to how HIV/AIDS went from a massive public health crisis in America to a manageable problem. As the virus became known, panic took hold. False reporting outran reality. But the bell curve took over; the virus’ transmission became well understood, better testing protocols developed, excellent preventive medicines became available, and treatment regimes now exist which ensure long lives in remission. Knowns displace unknowns. None of this is to minimize the suffering enroute to the current state, but to show there is an established path even for a virus far more deadly than corona.

Class concluded.

“Hey professor, is all this gonna be on the test?”

“No, but it may influence an election. And don’t forget to wash your hands before lunch, something is going around.”

They make it much harder for law enforcement to lie about their own actions, and just get everyone all fired up. Why not ask Apple (for starters) to build in a “feature” on a future generation of iPhones that will allow cameras to be disabled remotely?

A patent granted to Apple this month details technology that remotely disables iPhone cameras using infrared sensors. Someone you do not know and cannot see will be able, without your permission, to disable the camera on a phone you own and are legally using, perhaps to take video of your son’s Little League game, perhaps to take video of a police officer choking to death an innocent man.

Apple’s patent application used the example of a rock band wanting to prevent audience members from recording a concert. Nasty bootleggers and their darn YouTubing!

While the First Amendment, backed up by much case law, guarantees the right of citizens to record the actions of government employees, including the police, conducting their duties in public places, the Amendment does not guarantee corporate America has to sell you the technology to do so. It is Constitutionally unclear if a police force using such technology to block video would violate the First Amendment (hey, you could switch over to your Dad’s camcorder that’s in the basement), but knowing the way things work, the cops would try it first, worry about court cases later.

And indeed you can hear the arguments terrorism, national security event, blahblahblah. Perhaps the police could designate First Amendment Video Zones outside any large event where citizens could shoot video of each other to their heart’s content?

Another interesting legal question would be the effect of citizens using some other technology to disable the technology used by police to disable camera phones. Would that become illegal, the way some states have made the use of radar detectors in your car illegal?

So as the cops like to say, “Hey, nothing to see here folks, move along.”

The FBI on Thursday threatened to raise the stakes in its legal battle with Apple, suggesting it could demand access to the iPhone’s source code and the electronic signature used to verify its software updates.

Battle Over Encryption

As part of the ongoing battle between the government and the tech industry over encryption in the United States, the FBI demanded Apple help it defeat the password security features on an iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to create a modified version of the iPhone operating software that would allow the FBI to run an unlimited number of brute force attacks against a phone’s password to gain access.

When Apple refused to assist voluntarily, the FBI went to court, where a U.S. Magistrate Judge cited the 1789 All Writs Act as legal justification to force Apple to comply. Apple is now appealing that court decision.

FBI Wants It All

But in a new court filing on Thursday, the FBI said that if it can’t require Apple to create the weakened software, it may demand access to Apple’s actual source code instead. Source code is the programming instructions that run the iPhone, and controls every aspect of the phone’s operation, including security protections.

The FBI also said it may demand Apple’s signature digital key, which is required to update software on all iPhones. That key is what allows Apple to push out updates with the assurance that only its software will be installed by a phone. With the digital key, the FBI would be able to push out malware and spyware of its own design to any Apple phone worldwide.

Basically, with the digital key, the FBI would be able to fool technology globally that it “was Apple.” The key is a very powerful tool, to either ensure security, or defeat it.

The Lavabit Case

The Apple case is not the first time the government has demanded encryption keys from private businesses.

In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, the government demanded the digital encryption keys used by a secure email service, Lavabit, alledgedly used by Snowden. Lavabit shut down its services in August 2013 to avoid being forced to compromise user data, with founder Ladar Levison saying at the time: “I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

In the Apple case, if the FBI got access to those two items, the source code and the digital key, the Bureau could write a security-weakened version of iOS and install it on any phone they wished. The FBI’s threat was thinly-veiled:

The FBI itself cannot modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature,” the agency wrote in its court filing. “The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labor by Apple programmers.

Time to get scared.

The government wants it all — not just your data, but the technical tools and code to control your devices and bypass any security and encryption you or the tech companies might employ. That would be the end of any Fourth Amendment protections left that apply to the digital world.

In an attempt to convince Americans that having encryption and password-beating backdoors installed on their electronics so the government can snoop, the FBI first claimed the evil ISIS terrorists who shot up San Bernardino found a way to “beat” all of the resources of the NSA and lock down their iPhone to prevent further plots from being discovered. Lives were at risk, so the Fourth Amendment be damned!

That wasn’t really true.

It turns out, as the Justice Department acknowledged in its court filing, that the passcode of shooter Syed Farook’s iCloud account had been reset by the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, “in an attempt to gain access to some information in the hours after the attack… but that had the effect of eliminating the possibility of an auto-backup.” A federal official familiar with the investigation confirmed that investigators were indeed in possession of the phone when the reset occurred.

So, OK, it wasn’t the darn terrorists who did it, it was the dumb hicks at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. Well, nonetheless, it wasn’t the FBI’s fault, so the FBI should be given the hacking tools needed to access all iPhone everywhere forever, or, maybe, something might happen again someday somewhere. At least with things in the FBI’s hands, such dumb mistakes wouldn’t happen.

Only that wasn’t really true either.

It turns out it was in fact the best of the best, FBI investigators seeking to recover data from the iPhone, who demanded a technician in the County Department of Public Health to reset the phone’s iCloud password. “The county and the FBI were working together cooperatively to obtain data, and at the point when it became clear the only way to accomplish the task at hand was to reset the iCloud password, the FBI asked the county to do so, and the county complied,” a spokesman for San Bernardino County said in an email. Except that wasn’t true or accurate and they screwed things up further by trying something dumb.

So here is what is true.

Apple could have recovered information from the phone had the Apple ID passcode not been changed under orders from the FBI, Apple said. If the phone was taken to a location where it recognized the Wi-Fi network, such as the San Bernardino shooters’ home, it could have easily been backed up to the cloud. The FBI then lied about whose incompetence lead to the mistake.

In other words, while the FBI is demanding massive changes in how Apple protects your privacy, none of those change would even be necessary if anyone on the government side understood how iCloud works. And these guys want us to believe we can trust them with our data, and indeed, our freedom.

A magistrate judge in California on Tuesday ordered Apple to help the FBI retrieve encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers. Investigators have so far been unable to gain access to the data on killer Syed Rizwan Farook’s phone, which could contain communications between him and his wife and co-conspirator, Tashfeen Malik, and potentially others, prior to the December 2 shooting rampage that killed 14 people.

“Prosecutors said they needed Apple’s help accessing the phone’s data to find out who the shooters were communicating with and who may have helped plan and carry out the massacre, as well as where they traveled prior to the incident,” NBC News reports. “The judge ruled Tuesday that Apple had to provide ‘reasonable technical assistance’ to the government in recovering data from the iPhone 5c, including bypassing the auto-erase function and allowing investigators to submit an unlimited number of passwords in their attempts to unlock the phone.”

The court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said “Apple has the exclusive technical means which would assist the government in completing its search, but has declined to provide that assistance voluntarily.” Apple has five days to respond to the ruling.

Can the Feds Break Into the iPhone?

Some interesting issues afoot here. First, it appears the FBI cannot figure out a way to bypass Apple’s security feature, the one that bricks the phone after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts. If Apple modified the phone so an unlimited number of attempts can be made, then the Feds would simply brute force the password, trying potentially millions of combinations.

Or is it?

America’s intelligence agencies have so far been unsuccessful in persuading manufacturers and/or Congress to create and pass on to them backdoors around security and encryption. The FBI may indeed know how to get into the iPhone, but wants to make this a public example case — who can complain about learning more about real terrorists (no ambiguity issues), and of course the phone’s owners are dead, and so cannot claim their Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure/privacy are being violated.

Also of interest would be an Apple claim that while they will cooperate, it is technically impossible to comply with the request, i.e., the phone simply cannot be modified as the FBI wishes. Could a court require Apple to turn over all of their code and engineering documents so that the NSA could have a shot at what Apple said it could not do on its own?

Equally interesting would be even if Apple can comply this time, would Apple run into future legal issues if they created a next generation phone that truly could not be modified no matter what, making it fully unhackable, even by their own engineers?

Either way, the suit against Apple sets a precedent, likely making it easier for the Feds to compel cooperation from tech companies in more legally hazy cases in the future.

Apple Responds

Apple has vowed to aggressively fight the federal order to unlock the iPhone. CEO Tim Cook published a public response that said “We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

So the good (?) news is in 2016 we are now depending on a private company to protect our privacy against the wishes of our own government.

At age 53 everything changed. I was run out of the good job I had held for over 20 years, and for a long time the pension I’d earned, the thing I had counted on to provide for me, was in jeopardy. My skill set was pretty specific to my old job, the market was tough and nobody with a salaried job to offer seemed interested in an old guy and I needed some money. The sign pointed one way: retail and minimum wage. Those experiences at a store we’ll call here “Bullseye” helped inspire my new book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. Here’s an excerpt from that book.

Let the young men in other small Ohio towns dream of bright lights. In Reeve, Ohio we thought growing up we were going to work in that factory. But while we thought it was drawn in ink, it was really watercolor. There were pieces of machinery from the factory left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization, droppings of our failure. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there.

Reeve lost out on the Bullseye store, when Gibbsville offered better tax breaks plus a couple years’ free lease on the old high school land after they closed the second high school due to people moving away.

The idea was our tax money was used to lure that company in, and they were smart enough to play Reeve off against Gibbsville like we did in football. It was our tax money being used to create jobs for us. They held a job fair, with tables set up in the other high school’s gym, decorated with magic marker-written signs and a few tired balloons, which was all that stood for the fair part. A lot of people were already lined up when I got there, and the Bullseye people were wearing their bright blue vests walking around, looking us over like livestock. We covered a lot of ground, from last year’s model of homecoming queen to retired guys who couldn’t afford to retire. “Interested in loading dock?” they said to me, “C’mon over and talk about cosmetics here,” they’d say to the pretty high school girls. We were good little pieces of meat.

One guy said that because Bullseye drove his small store outta business he had to take a minimum wage job at Bullseye, which only pays him enough so that he sorta has to buy at Bullseye. They made him a greeter at the front door and told him to be enthusiastic. He was. Like that, all the jobs were not much. You got one and you were happy at first, but you soon felt like you made it onto one of the life boats from the Titanic but were just waiting for the next big wave to dump.

My job at Bullseye was to take big boxes of things off the truck, and do the break down. It was called officially by Bullseye “Inbound Event Processing.” What happened is that a computer at the Bullseye headquarters called a computer at a warehouse, which notified a computer in New Jersey to send off a buy order ultimately to a factory computer in Thailand to make some more headache pills to replace the ones we had ordered for our store. They came in a big carton of say 144 smaller boxes. I tore a pick sheet off the printer, which told me to count out thirty-six of boxes into a plastic tub labeled Pharmacy, then count out twenty-four more and put them into a tub labeled Grocery, and so forth. Somebody else would come into the back room from each of those departments and take their tub. Because of me and my counting, the Bullseye store could order a big cheap box of 144 and I’d divide them up right. A computer could not do that and so almost reluctantly I had a job.

The job was real easy to learn. There was no apprentice system needed here, no paid jobs for boiler operators’ assistants, no plumber’s helpers. I walked in and Steve, the Team Leader, said “Take the pick sheet there, go to the truck, hit them with that barcode scanner gun, count them out right, initial the pick sheet and put it in that folder. Fifteen minute break’s at noon. No talking. Come in to work through the rear entrance, never use the front door or park in a guest space. Late from break twice and you’re fired. Bullseye welcomes you as a valuable addition to our team, um, Earl.” He’d looked up just at the end of my welcoming speech at my name tag. It was almost like Bullseye didn’t want him to think much. Maybe us neither.

On my first day, I met with Teri, from Human Resources. She told me I had to decide how Bullseye would pay me. See, Bullseye wanted everyone to use electronic direct deposit, which was the cheapest, well, Teri said best, thing for Bullseye and thus for its valued team members. Problem is that to use direct deposit you had to have a place to deposit into directly, a bank account. That used to be simple, and as a kid I remember being walked into the bank one Saturday morning with a bag of quarters and some paper birthday money to open my first passbook savings account. The old guy banker even let me keep the pen I used to sign things. Now, banks want chunky minimum amounts to open an account, and want to charge you for checks and stuff and fees, so for a guy like me banks were too expensive. You also needed a mailing address and ID to prove you were just homeless and not a homeless terrorist.

“No problem,” said Teri from Human Resources, “Bullseye understands and for a $7.95 biweekly courtesy fee will gladly issue you a paper check.” I would then have to take the check to a storefront check cashing place ’cause I had no bank account, and pay a courtesy fee of four percent largely because they could care less if you’re a homeless terrorist as long as they get their share.

“No problem,” said Teri from Human Resources, “Bullseye understands and will pay you in the form of a debit card. It looks just like a regular credit card, and every two weeks your salary gets loaded on it electronically, automatically.” I could even manage it on-line, if I had an on-line. So I did that. Only I found out that to get actual cash I had to stick the thing into an ATM for a fee, and if the balance fell below a minimum, fee, and there was a monthly maintenance charge fee, so basically if I didn’t spend it quick enough in the right way my money evaporated. The only place I didn’t pay a fee to spend my own money was if I used the card at Bullseye. Even just getting my hands on my money I’d earned was like trying to pick up dog poo by the clean end.

Teri also guided me through my drug test. Most places that don’t pay much seem really concerned that their workers are drug-free. I’m not sure why this is, ’cause I learned that you can be a banker or lawyer and get through the day higher than birds on a cloud. Regardless, I did what I had to do in front of another person, handing him the warm cup. He gave me one of those universal signs of the underemployed I now recognized, a “we’re all in it, what’re ya gonna do” look, just a little upward flick of his eyes. Even though I was hung over, I did pass thanks to alcohol not being part of the test.

Then I had to buy some blue, collared shirts and what my mom would’ve called khaki slacks, which were the uniform for Bullseye. I got to keep and wash the uniform, which was okay I guess, but even with the employee discount it meant that I worked my first two days just to buy the clothes they wanted me to have. As a kid I used to get all my clothes at Christmas mostly, except for jeans and T’s, but you had to be pretty rich to wear jeans and a T to work.

It was hard to get to know the other workers, the associates, as we were told not to talk and because it turned out that Steve the Team Leader had another computer. His computer wasn’t hooked up to the headache pill factory but instead was watching those pick sheets. As I came to learn, the bar code scanner was kind of watching over me. The people who came and picked up my filled tubs had one too, and those scanners told Steve how fast I was picking and filling. On days when I apparently wasn’t doing those things fast enough, Steve would come out and tell me I was not performing to my full potential as a valued teammate and that meant I had to work faster. I did. I did not have his computer, so I wasn’t sure how fast was right, or fast enough, and so I tried to just do it all as fast as I was able. But no mistakes—Steve was angry, sure, if I was slow, but if I put too many or too few into a bin and the bar code scanner told him, that made him especially angry. It was my job to pick and sort stuff, but it was Steve’s job to make sure Bullseye made money, he said. That was what I came to know as management. Still, it was better than when I worked off-the-books for a while in the craft store at Christmas, coming home like a dancing girl with a pocket full of ones and fives covered in glitter.

This girl named Leigh missed one day. She told Kevin the Store Manager she misread the schedule. Kevin said if she didn’t have a doctor’s note then one more time and she was gonna get excused, get back to work, have a good day. Excused was the word Bullseye used instead of fired. Words sort of meant something different inside Bullseye, like they never really wanted to make it clear what they meant. Kevin the Store Manager said one time he had worked twelve years for Bullseye, so he knew the special meaning words, and the rules and the tricks, and got to be the boss. Kevin the Store Manager loved rules. He was probably the only person who really didn’t stick Q-Tips in his ears just because the box said not to. Rules made him feel comfortable by making his choices smaller. He’d flirt clumsily with the high school worker girls, and they’d flirt back without enthusiasm thinking it might be good for their jobs in some still-developing pubescent version of being nice to the boss. Everybody learned fast. Kevin had as his big responsibilities making sure the pricing guns were racked at the end of each shift, and doing bag searches for the cashiers on the way out the door so they wouldn’t steal. You could guess this wasn’t Kevin’s dream job. It was nobody’s dream job. It was just somewhere you ended up and, if you were tired or unlucky, got stuck.

Out in the parking lot, this young guy with a clipboard came up.

“Hey, you got a minute? I’m from the union, wanna talk with you about a meeting we’re having soon.”

“Get away. We heard about you at the last team-building exercise. They said to stay away or we’d get fired. Said you can’t even be in this parking lot, it’s private property of Bullseye.”

“Just give me a minute. C’mon, they’re paying you, what, $7.25 an hour? That’s what a fast food lunch you gotta eat in your 15 minutes of break costs. Is that really what an hour of your labor, your life, is worth?”

“Mister, back off. We ain’t got much but these jobs. We’re scared. Some of us got kids and all of us got bills. We can’t afford to go to your meeting.” That union guy was out there all the time, even when it was raining. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why someone would be standing there in the rain. Must have been somethin’ in it for him.

New thing: Everyone has to memorize the five rules of superior customer service and recite them on demand from Kevin the Store Manager. He actually walks around the store and stops us, saying, “Earl, tell me Rule Number Three.” Rule Three is, “Ask the guest if she has found everything she desires.” The hard part is about half the staff speak Spanish, and memorizing the rules is really hard for them. Thank you for listening to this and please come again (adapted by me from Rule Five).

New break policy: zero to five and a half hour shift, no break. New schedule policy: all shifts reduced to five and a half hours or less. Somebody said it was illegal not to give us breaks, but what can you do, call the cops like it was a real crime? Well, turns out the joke’s on me. I asked that union guy out in the parking lot about it, and he explained to me that we were in a “Right to Work” state. By law, employers are not required to grant breaks to anyone over age 16; Bullseye gives us some kinda break, but in other places minimum wage workers like us do eight and nine hour shifts without a meal or a chance to get off their feet for a few minutes.

I actually asked Kevin the Store Manager about this. He was always encouraging us to talk to him about anything. “My door is always open,” he said, before going into his office and closing the door. One time I knocked, and standing in the doorway I asked him about having a break more often, just a few minutes to sit down and take a load off, and Kevin the Store Manager said:

“You’re lucky to have this job. Lotta people out there who’d take your place.”

“I know Kevin, and I’m grateful. I’d just like a chance to sit down and eat a regular lunch on long shifts.”

“Well, we all gotta do what is best for Bullseye. Careful you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

I got it. Even if I’m never fed.

People not caring like that let the bullies get in charge. When I was a kid I really believed the border between me and the world leaked both ways, so that I could maybe affect things instead of just being affected by them, but it’s different now when you work for a company like Bullseye. At that point you realize that not everything is possible, and that changes everything.

I did start talking once in a while with a woman named Jodie. She wasn’t very pretty, but she had that desperate available look in her eyes, the one women don’t see ’cause it isn’t there around women. “I got two kids,” Jodie told me. She was always tired, saying the one kid won’t sleep alone and insisted on crawling into her bed at night. “I told all the kids, Mama doesn’t have any more sugar, go to bed, but they keep coming around.” The older one watched the younger one all day while Jodie was at work, and at night he wanted time with Mom. Price on families is hard to measure but easy to see.

“After Chris, who used to be my boyfriend, lost his part time job and took up drinking full time, things went bad for us at home,” Jodie told me. “He’d come back later and later, and then started coming back so late it was early the next day. Too many times our money ran out ’fore the month did. Food bank at the Salvation Army looked like the Monroe Mall used to look, same people in line nowadays. It was first come, first served, and people with cars could get there before us that had to wait for the first bus at 4:22 a.m., so it wasn’t fair. Some mornings you’d be standing in the weather with the kids for hours for boxes of macaroni and cheese.”

“Hey Jodie,” interrupted Ephraim, her Team Leader. “Can you quit break a few minutes early and clear off the end caps on aisles four and six? We got a load of those new iTablets coming in and corporate wants to give them a lot of shelf frontage before the holidays.”

“Sure Ephraim, I’ll get right to it. What do you want me to do with all the boxes of macaroni and cheese that’re out there now?”

Guests, which was a Bullseye word for what we used to call customers, like us, but a darker version of us. One of them made one of the high school girl associates cry, saying she was gonna ruin her kid’s birthday because we sold the last of some stupid toy before she got there. Kevin the Store Manager came over and apologized, stepping right between the red-faced consumer and the crying valued associate, promising a rain check special order and a swift and courteous checkout when the time came. Another one threatened to call the police on us because we closed earlier than he said we said we would.

Funny thing happened. I was walking in to work, hat and jacket on outside so no one could see my Bullseye nametag and all. Some woman bumped into me by accident. She turned and apologized, said something about the weather getting colder and said sorry again, smiling. I then saw her like ten minutes later inside the store, me dressed as a Bullseye associate and her pushing a shopping cart. She almost ran over me, but didn’t say a word. Me, a person in the parking lot, but just an item inside.

We all learned the look, the minimum wage stare, the look that pleads with the customer to please just give up because we can’t fix it, but we won’t care about not fixing it. There was nothing else we could do. In return, the customer can say just about anything to us. Bullseye values its guests, so much that for a $4.99 purchase they can treat us this way. Self-respect goes cheap in Aisle 38.

Most of us were just trying to make a little money. But some people were spayed. They’d been yelled at too many times, or were too afraid of losing their jobs. They were broke. People—and dogs—don’t get like that quickly; it has to build up on them, or tear down on them, like erosion, one thing after another nudging them deeper into it. Then one day, if the supervisor told them by mistake to hang a sign upside down, they’d do it, more afraid of contradicting the boss than making an obvious mistake. You’d see them rushing in like twenty minutes early to stand next to that clock so they wouldn’t be late. One associate broke down in tears when she accidentally dropped something, afraid she’d get fired on the spot for it. They all walked around like the floor was all stray cat tails, step on one and set off all the cats screaming. It was a bad way to live as an adult, your only incentive to doing good work being they’d let you keep a job that made you hate yourself for another day.

Before I gave up, there was a potential, a white shirt maybe a little dirty, but with another good washing left in it to carry it into tomorrow. I had known prosperity, I had a place, at least in theory, I could bounce back to. Not these kids. They are never going to know where back is. They’re never gonna trust no one, never gonna trust nothing. When I was little, we all wanted to be astronauts. What do they have to grow up to be? To work at Bullseye? Jodie and those boys wanted me to give them some kind of a future when I couldn’t see down the road for myself, never mind for three other already wounded people. She said “I love you” to me a couple of times, but we both knew it wasn’t love or lust—maybe just comfort. And if they were lies, and you wanted to choose to believe them, then there was no sin. Sometimes that’s all you can expect, and sometimes that’s enough.

Still, me and Jodie got along well, and we thought of ways we could help each other. One day her kids were sick and she didn’t want to leave them home alone, so she brought them in to work. She told them to stay in the toy aisle all day looking at things, pretending like they could buy them, and me and Jodie took turns quietly checking on them until quitting time. Some cough-soothing syrup went missing too between my picking and Pharmacy’s filling. That day of all days Jodie got asked again to work through her break, so I had to feed the sick kids Ho-Ho’s and red pop for lunch, which probably made them feel better than me overall.

Our biggest attempt at trying to help each other was after Jodie transferred to sporting goods and one day told me how customers were always asking her for Aze bandages and white tape and stuff. That all was kept over in Pharmacy. Bullseye told us our guests were the most important product, and had Rule Number Two that if a guest asked for something somewhere else in the store you couldn’t just say, “Sure, over in Aisle Seven,” but you had to walk them there as a courtesy and wait to see if they found what they were looking for or needed additional guest service interaction. Jodie said the problem was so many people kept asking for athletic tape that she was walking a lot and her team manager, Ephraim, was on her for not being at her station. She told Ephraim about the athletic tape taking her away, but he said something about her needing to learn to work smarter not harder, which did not seem to help, because the athletic tape was still not where customers were asking for it. Having to actually talk to the customers, we came to understand, was the weak link in the chain of efficiently transferring money from them to Bullseye.

“So Earl,” Jodie said, “I know how we can get ahead here. We can do this thing called innovation Ephraim told us about at the last team-building meeting. He said we have to be ahead of our customers’ needs to succeed in this market. So, you pick me some athletic bandages and tape, and put them in my tub instead of Pharmacy. I’ll have the new things set up all nice near my station, and when Ephraim comes by I’ll show them off. We’ll for sure win that ‘Catch Us Doing Our Best’ prize.”

I think it was only because firing two valued teammates at the same time would’ve made Steve and Ephraim look bad, or because they couldn’t figure out a way to blame it on one another, that we didn’t get thrown out that day. Ephraim was a cooler Team Leader, explaining to Jodie about unit stock control, location sales metrics, and how important it was that each Bullseye store maintain its unique identical layout. Steve just told me never to do anything that wasn’t on the pick sheet again, or he’d call security and have me walked out. He also later secretly tagged me on my performance review as ineligible for rehire, which I only found out after I was laid off and trying to use Bullseye as a reference for Taco Bell. Jodie got reassigned to the children’s section, which everyone hated because it was where the most shoplifting took place and she was worried about having to see one of her mom friends doing it. Her first task was to put out only one shoe of a pair on display, keep the other one in the back until someone paid, to discourage people from stealing ’cause they couldn’t get the set. After customers just started stealing any old right shoe to go with any left shoe on the rack, Jodie had to redo it so there were only left shoes on display.

Then for a while the big hope was for a German car factory to locate in our part of Ohio. It was in all the news. At one point cars were pretty much made in Detroit, then somehow we got from there to here, where Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII and Dresden looks like Detroit before WWII. I noticed some foreigners in nice clothes come in to the food court now and then, along with our politicians who were offering tax incentives. I’d listen in on them while I was wiping things up, hoping to get the inside track on those jobs.

“Mr. Mayor, we thank you for your hospitality. Our friend here from your governor’s office has taken us around to so many of your rustic small towns. I must say, Ohio is quite beautiful.”

“We do like it here Manfred—may I call you that? But of course in addition to being so pretty a countryside, we have a lot of hard-working Americans anxious to get started.”

“And that, if I may be blunt Mr. Mayor, is our concern. The tax breaks are generous. What worries us, frankly, are the workers. Our motorcars are complex machines, and our quality is our brand. Can your people meet our standards, at our price?”

“These are good people, Manfred. Salt of the earth.”

“Mr. Mayor, allow me to tell you a true story. Apple had redesigned their iPhone’s display literally at the last minute. New screens began arriving at the assembly plant in China near midnight the day before the units were to ship. A foreman roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, gave them each a hard biscuit and a cup of tea and sent them into the factory for work. Within thirty minutes of being woken, they started a twelve-hour shift fitting displays without a break to meet Apple’s deadline. Can your workers do that? Do they have those kinds of skills? Perhaps, of course, we would serve coffee instead of tea here. A little joke, yes?”

“Um, well, Manfred, I just don’t know. I mean, we have laws here, about people being able to sleep and how long they can work.”
“In my China factories I do not even by law have to allow workers breaks for water or sanitation. We do find limited meals are necessary for productivity. Those are the skills I need. Can your people provide them?”

“Manfred, really, those aren’t skills, getting out of bed to work in the middle of the night, twelve-hour shifts. You can’t bully your workers. Can you? What you’re talking is more like, well, I don’t know, more like you need farm animals than people.”

“Ha yes, Mr. Mayor. I understand your joke in English. We indeed have such a saying in German as well. You are funny, but in North Carolina they are offering us the incentive of using prison labor if we locate the plant there, only a few of your pennies an hour. I do think it would cost more to feed farm animals. That is my joke to you. But yes, yes, of course I understand. I have opened factories for our company all over the world, and I have heard the same thing in Shenzhen and in Chennai. In the end, there I have found workers at our price point, in our needed quantity, with the skills we require, despite these so-called ‘laws.’ It is flexibility those places offer me. Of course, your people do speak good English, and that is a plus for us. But can you guarantee me that they’ll work to our standards? Can you assure me for example that there will not be a union here to disrupt our labor price calculations?”

“Well, on the quality, sure, they’ll do it, of course. And now, you know I can’t control the thing about the union here—”

“Mr. Mayor, again, we are in your country and I am happy to follow your custom of direct speech. My company needs a North American facility, but our margins are tight. I can drop this plant across the border in Mexico as easily as I can drop it here. You will please think about that. Meantime, allow me to take a closer look at your labor pool, ‘size them up,’ I think you say in English, no?”

For me at Bullseye, things didn’t go so smoothly, even after I got my old position back. Steve the Team Leader explained one day that Bullseye had innovated a new warehousing system that centralized item distribution in such a way that goods came to our store pre-sorted into tubs. Instead of me breaking down a big box of toothpaste into tubs for Pharmacy and tubs for Grocery, it was done centrally somewhere else by someone else. The people who used to just have to pick up their filled tubs from me were redefined so that they now went into the big truck directly and lifted out their pre-filled tubs. They could skip their own bar code reading part, and so Steve laid off three of those people for efficiency, too. Steve did thank me very nicely for my contributions to the Bullseye family and took my blue vest. Steve said he hoped I would leave without a fuss.